Publication Type: Paper (prepared oral presentation)
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: The issue of how people develop moral knowledge and moral judgment is of theoretical and empirical importance in psychological literature. The cognitive-developmental approach is still the predominant today. However, a full account of morality may start from Kohlberg’s individual moral development, but it must recognize that intra-individual variations may reflect different individual ways of thinking about the social world. In this research, the individual conception of community and the boundaries within which people apply their sense of justice is considered as an evidence of the intra-individual variations on moral reasoning. The short-form of the Defining Issue Test was administered to 360 Italian participants. The classical dilemmas were changed by varying the identity of the protagonist of each dilemma. So each participant responded to three dilemmas, one about an Italian (ingroup), one about an American (considered as belonging to a morally-included community), and lastly one about a Rumanian person (considered as belonging to a morally-excluded community). The results effectively show that people’s moral reasoning is different according to the people being judged. If the person submitted to judgment belonged to a morally-excluded community, participants used an harsher morality, whereas if the person belonged to a morally-included community, participants tended to be more lenient and indulgent.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: What are moral issues? Empirical political science literature currently refers to a political matter as moral issue, based on the subjective perception of either the researcher or the respondents—without illuminating exactly what is it that makes some issues seem moral to some people—and suggests that ideology moderates moralizing of political issues. For instance, studies had argued, following the 2004 exit polls, that conservatives are higher in moral conviction. This paper develops theory and methodology for rigorously identifying moral issues and test for moderation by ideology. Two theories are employed to define moral conviction theoretically and operationally: Domain Theory and Sentimentalism. Next, two samples were collected to validate the measures and compare political issues on moral conviction. Results show Liberals and Conservatives moralize to the same extent, but differ in the particular issues moralized. For example, while the two issues highest on moral conviction for Conservatives are unsurprisingly gay adoption and abortion, Liberals show the strongest moral conviction on torture and capital punishment. Implications for political campaigns and for the dysfunctional public debate are discussed.

Publication Type: Paper (prepared oral presentation)
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: What are moral issues? Empirical political science often uses the term “moral” in a loose a-theoretic or descriptive way, which fail to illuminate exactly what is it that makes some issues seem moral to some people. For instance, “moral values” in the 2004 presidential election was a mere code name for specific issues, particularly gay marriage and abortion. This ambiguity did not stop researchers and pundits from hypothesizing relationships between moral conviction and ideology. Some had argued, following the results of the 2004 exit polls, that conservatives had voted on the moral issues and are generally higher in moral conviction. This paper develops theory and methodology for rigorously identifying moral issues and test for moderation by ideology. Two theories are employed to define moral conviction theoretically and operationally: Domain Theory and Sentimentalism. Next, two samples were collected to validate the measures and compare political issues on moral conviction. Results show Liberals and Conservatives moralize to the same extent, but differ in the particular issues moralized. For example, while the two issues highest on moral conviction for Conservatives are gay adoption and abortion, Liberals show the strongest moral conviction on torture and capital punishment. Focusing only on abortion and gay adoption as moral issues, as is often done in the literature, can thus give a very biased view of the differences in attending to morality by ideology. Implications for political campaigns and for the dysfunctional public debate are discussed.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Third parties often intervene in conflicts and use coercive tactics to try to prevent or stop disputants from fighting. The conventional wisdom holds that coercive intervention is generally effective because it alters the balance of power between disputants or drives up their costs for failing to reach a negotiated settlement. Unfortunately, the logic underpinning the conventional wisdom does not adequately account for the effects of strategic interaction. For example, although intervention might make one party more willing to settle a dispute, the other party may exploit the situation and take riskier actions or make larger demands. Thus, intervention may produce unintended consequences that undermine conflict management efforts. Some analysts have argued that the incentive structure produced by a third party may create a moral hazard. This essay shows that although the concept of moral hazard is heuristically useful, it does not accurately describe the incentive structure produced by third-party intervention. Moral Hazards only occur when there is an opportunity for agents to take "hidden actions." As it turns out, when third parties engage in coercive intervention, they are seldom unaware that their actions are emboldening some of the disputants. Instead, there are a number of reasons why third parties may choose to ignore these adverse effects. Most importantly, although intervention may unleash some countervailing forces, it may nevertheless decrease the overall chance of conflict.

Publication Type: Paper (prepared oral presentation)
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Recent theories and evidence from moral psychology indicate that moral judgment does not necessarily involve any intricate effortful analysis, and often occurs very quickly, via emotional or unconscious intuitive responses. Consequently, some political attitudes may be guided by moral judgment even without postulating particular citizen capabilities. Thus, emotional and intuitive moral judgment can assist in explaining how public opinion is overall stable and intelligible, despite the robust evidence that the public is “innocent of ideology”. Accordingly, this paper integrates two research traditions, Sensibility-Sentimentalism and Domain-Theory, to develop and experimentally test a bi-dimensional theoretical framework for moral judgment of politics. Two experiments demonstrate that incidental harm and incidental disgust, but not sadness and damage, interact with the view on gay adoption in affecting cold and hot moral conviction. Thus, both harm and disgust manipulation increased cold moral conviction, i.e. viewing the issue as moral according to domain theory characteristics, as well as hot moral conviction, i.e. the emergence of moral emotions in response to gay adoption, among people opposed to gay adoption, but decreased cold moral conviction for supporters of gay adoption. This could be explained as a consequence of an emotional-cognitive dissonance: when one feels negative emotions or encounter a sense of harmfulness upon appraising a practice they are supposed to support, they downplay the generalizability of this attitude in the face of incongruent common norms or laws, which are the characteristics of the moral domain. Finally, primed incidental harm, but not disgust, sadness, and damage, significantly increases harsher moral judgment of gay adoption.